Law and order: stabfest confusion

By Richard North - June 3, 2021

As I was collating the material for this piece, up popped this item on my news feed, telling us of a “large police presence” at Victoria station in Manchester, after a male aged 17 was stabbed following a fight on a tram.

There were no further details available at the time of writing but we have enough already to add this to the growing list of knife crimes affecting this benighted country. Whether there is a racial element in this – as in the attackers being non-white British is too early to say, although even to ask seems to be, in the view of some people, racist behaviour.

Yet, while it is fair to say that the ethnicities of criminals and their victims are only some of the factors influencing the nature and frequency of violent crimes, and in some incidents, ethnicity will play a relatively small part, or none at all, in other incidents, it may be the dominant factor.

Whatever the relative contribution, though, it cannot be denied that it is an issue of concern and, in many cases, as relevant as whether the victim is a man or woman, or the age and sex of the attacker. The ethnicity is one other piece of information which goes towards our appreciation – however imperfect – of the nature of crimes we see reported.

As I observed yesterday though, the only time we might get to know whether the accused in a crime report is black (or of other ethnicity) is from photographs or drawings from a court artist. The same goes for details of attackers in crime reports. Such problems are not always so apparent when the perpetrators are obviously white British.

We see this dynamic in a report here of the sad case of the murder of Peninah Kabeba, 42, was found on 27 May stabbed to death at her property on Park Road in Cheam, close to the Surrey border. The police have named the woman, and details of her age and occupation have been published. Pictures of the woman show her to be black – as might be guessed from her name.

With commendable speed, the police have charged her assailant with murder, who is due to appear at the Old Bailey on 13 August. We are told that he is a man, that he is 56-years-old and that he was Peninah Kabeba’s lodger. But we are not told his ethnicity, and we have not been given his name – from which we might possibly guess his status.

There may be good reasons why these details have been withheld, but it does seem rather frequently the case that, where black or Asian assailants are involved in violent crime, the police are reticent to reveal those details.

I may be wrong in this, but it certainly the impression – reinforced by another report of a stabbing, this one in Greenwich.

Police, we are told, say there were reports of men fighting on the Greenwich Peninsula, with one victim found with apparent stab wounds. A crime scene was in place, and London’s Air Ambulance had been called. A later report allows us to be told that the victim is a man, and that he is in hospital in a critical condition. But, even though the police must have this detail, his ethnicity is withheld.

The Edgware park stabbing has ten arrested, with no details of ethnicity, as is the case with yet another report of a stabbing. This incident apparently occurred in the Poplar area, some 30 minutes before the Greenwich report.

What is odd about this one is that, when police officers arrived at the scene, they could not find a victim. However, an ice cream operator says he saw one person in his late teens or early twenties get “stabbed three times in the shoulder”. Four or five boys had bought ice cream from him and then had started fighting right behind his ice cream van. One had “just pulled out a big knife”. We are not allowed to know the ethnicity of either victim or assailants, but once again these details must be known.

To add a further element of variety, we also have a report of a combined stabbing and shooting in Brixton, where the police were called to the scene at 9:37pm by the London Ambulance Service who had treated a man in his 20s for gunshot wounds and stabbing injuries.

A group later threw objects at police called to the scene, riot vans were seen in the area as a number of roads were closed while helicopters searched overhead. Needless to say, despite the location being known as a “black” area, no details of the ethnicity of any of the parties is revealed.

In some respects, it is important to establish ethnicity early in such cases, in order to rule out non-white British assailants, otherwise there is a tendency to assume that every incident involved blacks or Asians – which is very far from the case. In the UK as a whole, white British are responsible for the majority of stabbings.

This, of course, might be expected as the majority of people in this country, by far, identify as white British, amounting to some 80.5 percent of the population.

But the issues identified yesterday did not concern the country as a whole: we were addressing the problem in London. And there, according to the 2011 census, white British are the minority at 44.9 percent.

When I noted yesterday that London had changed, and not for the better, here is evidence of one of those changes. The indigenous British are the minority in their own capital city. Asians account for 18.5 percent of the population, blacks 13.3 and mixed races at five percent. London has the highest proportion of Asians and blacks in the country.

Interestingly, the highest proportion of white British reside in the North East – at 93.6 percent. Blacks account for about one half of one percent, compared with the national average of three percent – not counting the undocumented immigrants.

As to knife crime, there were more than 47,000 police-recorded offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in the 12 months to September 2020. Offences involving knives or sharp instruments have been rising since the year ending March 2014, although in recent years the rate of increase has slowed. There were 248 knife-related deaths in that same period.

London has the highest volume of knife crime, with more than 13,500 offences recorded in the last year. In England and Wales, we are told, 38 percent of knife possession offenders under 25s were non-white in 2017. It was two thirds in London.

Of the victim cohort, recent figures have teenagers accounting for more than 1,000 admissions to hospital in a year, as a result of assaults with a knife or sharp object.

One of England’s top trauma surgeons revealed that in one London trust alone, two people a day are admitted to hospital with a stabbing injury, having a devastating effect on families and placing avoidable pressure on NHS staff.

Metropolitan Police data also paint an interesting picture. Classified by “ethnic appearance”, in ten months of 2019, Afro-Caribbeans accounted for 20 percent of victims, while white Europeans contributed 34 percent.

When it came to the appearance of those proceeded against, the tables were reversed. Afro-Caribbeans provided 51 percent of the offenders, while white Europeans totalled 27 percent.

Drilling deeper into the figures, though, we see a newspaper report that black Londoners three times are more likely to be murdered than other ethnic groups. But the primary source indicates that most homicides were attributed to a killer of the same ethnicity as their victim.

And a London crime map shows that the largest number of homicides were recorded in Southwark while the lowest occurred in Sutton. Blacks in Sutton comprise just under five percent. In Southwark they make up 24 percent.

Unfortunately, there are no national figures for knife crime in England and Wales for 2020 by ethnicity, so we’re flying blind in some respects.

But what we do know is that by far the largest number of “serious offences involving a knife” (46 percent) come in the category “Assault with injury and assault with intent to cause serious harm”, while “robbery” comes a close second (42 percent).

If, overall, the statistics are muddled and far from complete, there are nevertheless enough data to show that black-on-black knife crime – as I asserted in my previous piece – is an issue. It would help if the police and media were more candid in their daily reports of the carnage we are experiencing.

And if to make such observations is racist, so be it. But if this issue can’t even be discussed without pundits rushing to judgement, we’re not going to get very far in our understanding of a complex problem which seems to be set to get worse.